New community in a new space: artificial,natural, created,contested. An idea from a golf estate in Johannesburg

Attention is constantly devoted to the question of living together and sharing spaces, which is often translated as a matter of social and spatial segregation and belonging to a community. New spatial, social and institutional geographies have emerged as a potential cornerstone of separateness and togetherness in South Africa with the emergence of the gated community. This article tackles the concept of “community” within the space of a golf estate (a type of gated community) located in the West Rand, Johannesburg. It aims to understand new geographies of the city through an analysis of the organisation and social life inside and outside the estate. The notion of community is explored by looking at the system engendered by the main legal actor within the estate, the Homeowners Association (HOA). It will be argued that some of these new spaces are made neutral through the action of the HOA, an agent that institutionally constructs a communitarian lifestyle, accepted and contested simultaneously by the residents. Through the formalisation of a system in which holiday-style living is promoted, life is represented as real to the residents but lived in a virtual way when linked to broader societal and urban changes, thus reframing the notion of segregation.     

Shocks and Spatial Regime Fades in Spain's International Migration Distribution

Using an exploratory space‐time analysis called spMorph, this article explores how the spatial distribution of international migration across the Spanish provinces has evolved over the period 1998‐2010. The chief advantage of this approach is that it permits the unambiguous identification of two key components in a spatial redistribution process, namely the shocks to the spatial distribution and the duration of regime fades. The results of the analysis show that administrative regions do not provide a reliable picture of the real dynamics in Spain's international migration distribution. In addition, the identification of two spatial shocks reveals the existence of three spatial regimes that consistently characterize the various phases that international migration has been through since the late 1990s.     

Policy diffusion as empowerment: domestic agency and the institutional dynamics of monetary policy diffusion in China

ABSTRACT

The policy diffusion literature has often focused on external pressures on domestic policy. However, by analysing the evolution of China’s monetary policy regime, we demonstrate a pattern of highly selective diffusion that is largely shaped by domestic political and institutional dynamics. We use an historical institutionalist approach to probe how the most relevant institutionally embedded agents, in this case, those within the Chinese central bank, have strategically engaged with this process. We show how selective diffusion has been shaped by epistemic policy learning through international engagement by China’s central bankers, and, in particular, how they have strategically used imported policy ideas as an institutional empowerment strategy, furthering the interests and agenda of the People’s Bank of China.     

The Dual Strategy and Gender Policies of the Women's Movement in Korea: Family Headship System Repeal through Strategic Innovation

Abstract

Social movements sometimes successfully attain their goals by implementing policies and laws that represent their claims. Movement leaders raise issues susceptible to enactment as policies or laws, exploit legally and institutionally assured resources, and even participate at times in governmental policymaking and parliamentary lawmaking processes. This engagement strategy maximizes a movement's power to achieve its goals only when it is combined with the conventional activities of mobilizing collective action and forming dense networks across movement organizations to pressure the state. Based on the case study of Korean women's movements and their efforts to abrogate the patrilineal succession of family headship, I argue that movement activists' strategic innovation of blending “institutional politics” with conventional “movement politics”—that is, pursuing a dual strategy (Cohen and Arato 1992) and evolving into “movement institutionalization”—is critical to accomplishing gender policies and laws that, at least institutionally and legally, ensure gender equality.     

Incorporation and Gated Communities in the Greater Metro-Los Angeles Region as a Model of Privatization of Residential Communities

ABSTRACT

The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the suburbs, privatization also takes the form of conservation easements that restrict access to public lands, the creation of shopping malls and new town centers relocated within these private commercial developments, and the building of gated residential communities. Accompanying this expansion of private interests are changes in strategies of governance and regional differences in how local governments and residents are encouraging private encroachment on public space. This article focuses this third set of privatization practices by discussing how gated communities manipulate municipal and town planning laws to control public space and tax dollars. To accomplish this task, I discuss the emergence of gated communities as a new form of privatization of urban/suburban space and then tease out the legal and institutional underpinnings of this spatial governance. The geography of gated communities in greater metro-Los Angeles region and their use of the strategy of incorporation to capture public taxes for private use is employed as a model for understanding the future of gating in the United States. The Los Angeles model is then compared to current gating patterns in urban and suburban gated communities in New York and Texas. These manipulations of private land use controls in the United States are not necessarily new, but with gating there is an accelerating trend away from governmental and public control of land use toward an increased reliance on privately created controls. The consequences of this shift toward privatization of land use control is an impoverishment of the public realm and access to public resources, especially public space.     

Internationalizing Anti-Racism Efforts

Abstract

Racial discrimination continues to haunt our societies, calling for sustained and new solutions. In 1994, the US government signed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Three years later, it ratified this international agreement. This article reviews the effectiveness of this United Nations Convention and discusses its main provisions: national reporting and the individual communications procedure. It finds that the treaty contains comprehensive and legally effective provisions to combat racial discrimination and argues that social workers, along with other professionals, should engage with the international legal regime to assist their clientele to combat racial discrimination. Social workers have a number of roles: advocate, educator, service provider and broker. Their involvement in such an international legal regime would have an added significance; it has the potential to expand the domain of international social work as well as overcome the limits of domestic action against racial discrimination.     

Older Persons and Compromised Decisional Capacity: The Role of Public Policy in Defining and Developing Core Professional Competencies

Issues frequently arise concerning the cognitive and emotional ability of older individuals to make certain legally significant decisions. In confronting these issues, the professional involvement of both attorneys and physicians (and other health care professionals), acting both individually and collaboratively, is desirable. This article describes the possible contributions of public policy in developing, through fostering innovations in medical and legal education, core competencies for physicians and attorneys that are essential to improving interprofessional collaboration on behalf of older individuals suspected of being compromised in their ability to make certain significant decisions. Additionally, ideas are suggested to address certain aspects of the current policy environment that may inhibit attorneys and physicians from optimal interprofessional interaction in this sphere.     

Outcharming crime in (D)urban space

This paper is an inquiry into the uses of space and emotions in the governance of urban dangers. Cities have always been affective assemblages, yet the role of both space and affect in the control of urban crime has dramatically changed over the century. What defines spatial urban management today, in Africa and elsewhere, are not the prohibitive, moralising or forcefully exclusionary techniques of the past; instead, the powers of seduction and atmosphere have gained pride of place and given rise to a regime of spatial management through flirty surfaces. Crime, according to security strategists and city makers in the South African city of Durban, can be literally charmed out from particular bubbles of governance. Urban practitioners do not search for the root causes of violent crime somewhere deep in the history of society, but rather in space itself, right at the city's surface. While part of a worldwide trend, this recent fascination with the charming aspects of space has a particularly strong South African dramatic. Governing through handsome space in South Africa is not simply a creation of beautiful illusions against the reality of pervasive violence, but a constant endeavour to re‐draw a troubled spatial history.     

Balinese cultural identity and global tourism: the Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park

ABSTRACT

The island of Bali has been inextricably bound up with the tourism industry. This article examines the dynamic Balinese cultural identity and its ever changing relationship with tourism in the age of globalism through the analysis of a case study: the construction of the Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park (between 1993–2018), containing an enormous statue of the Hindu God Wisnu mounting the magical bird Garuda. The park and statue can be seen as a new cultural landmark for the Indonesian nation and for the Balinese tourism industry. However, the case study of the park also shows how Bali has changed its role within the Indonesian archipelago since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 while dealing with new challenges of global tourism. Representations of a Balinese cultural identity have evolved from national, top-down level constructions of ‘cultural tourism’ into a global tourist destination through hosting international events at the park.     

Land use planning practice under the public land ownership policy in Tanzania

Land-use planning can be defined as a programme of state intervention in land use and environmental change to mediate conflicts of interests over how land should be used, developed, and coordinate individual activities which if left to proceed otherwise would lead to an environment for living that is characterised by negative externalities, inefficient use of land and services, inequity and unfair distribution of resources. The land-use programme is realised through a planning system, constituted by institutional arrangements, instruments and tools. Being one of the land policy tool by which the government intervenes in land-use change and development, land-use planning practice is, obviously, influenced by the content of the land policy as well as interests extant in a locality to include those of the planners and other land administrators. How does planning practice looks like under a public landownership policy? Through an empirical case of planning in practice, this paper provides an answer to this question.     

Politics and performance: the implications of emerging governance arrangements for urban management approaches and information systems

Challenges to traditional public sector approaches to urban government have had an impact on various aspects of governance and management, including political arrangements, decision making processes, ways of ensuring accountability, the allocation of roles and responsibilities between public sector agencies and other potential service providers and between different levels of government, and the mobilisation and allocation of financial resources for urban development. These are discussed, drawing in particular on recent research on urban poverty and governance in ten cities in the South. The changing approaches to urban government and management have been accompanied by attempts to define criteria by which urban governance arrangements and performance can be assessed, which are summarised and critically evaluated. Finally, the potential value of a particular set of tools (GIS) for emerging approaches to urban governance is assessed. Their potential for improving the information available to all governance actors is recognised. However, because of their cost and technological and managerial demands, as well as the limited effectiveness of spatial planning and inequalities in access to information, plans for their use must be financially, institutionally and politically realistic.     

Stakeholder management and program planning in German public theaters

Taking the example of a German public professional theater, this study is the first to analyze how stakeholder interests are managed in the process of program planning. We address the following questions: (1) What are the goals and interests of the most influential stakeholders? (2) How are these goals and interests reflected by theater management when deciding the season's program? (3) Which strategies does theater management apply to balance conflicting stakeholder goals and interests? Results of our qualitative study identify five decisions to be made with regard to program planning: selection of the season's theme, plays, stage directors, cast, and chronological order of productions. Four strategies of balancing conflicting stakeholder goals and interests are identified: setting priorities, combining stakeholder interests, focusing on neutral goals, and developing audiences.     

Freighting English law: interpreting maritime spaces,law and the Armenian strategies in the Indian Ocean

In this article, I examine the formation of the English East India Company's legal regime in the Indian Ocean between the mid‐eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I look at how this process affected maritime trade and space from the vantage point of Armenian merchants' interactions with the colonial regime in the courts of law. The productive tensions arising from the colonial regime's new protocols and the merchants' leveraging tactics make for a complex story of Anglo‐Armenian dialogue. I argue that indigenous agency in the colonial courts complicated the binary colonial/indigenous structure. The idea of legal pluralism that emerges from the article suggests that the identity of an imperial subject or the definition of law was neither a given nor simply imposed through colonial coercion but was a complex product of a long‐term dialogue and rationalization.     

The Dual State: The Unruly "Subordinate", Caste, Community And Civil Service Recruitment In North India, 1930–1955

Abstract  This paper explores the nature of the everyday state in historical perspective in colonial and postcolonial Uttar Pradesh, north India, through the lens of civil service recruitment. It argues that social relationships between different cadres of the revenue and police services effectively created a bureaucratic space in which citizens' approaches to the state recreated forms of ambiguity in the reach and authority of state power. In this sense, it provides a deeper historical basis for anthropological and sociological work on the nature of the "fuzzy" everyday state in postcolonial India. But it develops this literature further, arguing that important structural changes over independence in 1947, also transformed the ways in which caste and community lobby groups represented their corporate interests through bureaucratic recruitment. These lobby groups, as a result of disjunctions in state power and discourses, between centre, province and locality, were often able to subvert systems of caste and community reservation. In the process, their actions emphasized the inability of the state at central and provincial levels to adjust to local political identities that depended on hybridity.     

Legal issues affecting residential child care workers

Most respondents felt that child care workers' legal concerns should be addressed by requiring (1) thorough, legally approved written procedures and guidelines for all day-to-day procedures and responsibilities; (2) legally approved comprehensive record-keeping systems; and (3) access to legal support and counsel. When child care workers follow legal guidelines and a facility's procedure manuals carefully, documenting their activities in an approved record-keeping system, they can expect to be in a positive situation in any legal contest and to have behavior measured from a legal standpoint by a standard described as what a "reasonable person" would be expected to do in a similar situation and circumstance.     

The urban design of a Balinese town: placemaking issues in the Balinese urban setting

This research considers the role of indigenous institutions and conceptions of space in the urban design process for producing culturally appropriate designs for Balinese towns. Employing a pluralistic approach (The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1960; Planning a Pluralist City: Conflicting Realities in Ciudad Guyana, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1976; House Form and Culture, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, Human Aspects of the Built Form, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1977), a case study of the town of Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia explores the popular accounts on the operative indigenous conceptions of space in contemporary Balinese urban settings. This exploration aims at providing a ground for reconnecting urban design proposals with their cultural context, thus promoting the spatially expressed localism originating from the diversity of cultures which is currently undermined by the highly standardized process of the Indonesian planning system. In particular, for the town of Gianyar, such an exploration provides a set of placemaking issues which is useful in devising urban design guidelines for achieving a town with more pronounced cultural identity.The research concludes that to achieve culturally appropriate places, the design process has to acknowledge the Balinese Hindu psycho-cosmic concept as the core principle in the design of Balinese townscapes. As such, the existing indigenous cosmic territory, which accommodates the relationship between human (microcosm) and environment (macrocosm), along with its adat law and institution, has to be incorporated in contemporary urban design processes. As a result, urban spatial organization, structure and form will significantly reflect the Balinese cultural identity.     

The Presidio Trust legislation: preservation or privatization?

This analysis of the Presidio Trust legislation places the recent developments on the Presidio in the context of a century and a half of environmental planning. By first exploring the Presidio's history, and then tracing the more recent legislative background to the Presidio Trust, the author establishes a clear frame through which to explore the current challenges that face the Presidio Trust. This paper argues that history, legislative intent, and specific legal precedent will protect the Presidio from being "sold off," despite growing local concerns that the Presidio Trust's mandate to become financially self-sufficient within 15 years may drive the public's interests from the park. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Spatial Governance and Working Class Public Spheres: The Case of a Chartist Demonstration at Hyde Park

The concepts of the public sphere and public space have gained increasing purchase within social history. This paper contributes to this literature by theoretically developing a critical approach to both concepts. By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin circle, as well as Marxism and Poststructuralism, the paper suggests that public spheres under capitalism are structured through the basic contradiction between capital and labour. Each public sphere may then be seen as a refracted dialogic and spatial form of this basic contradiction, and is then best viewed as a contradictory spatial entity that obtains its unique identity through different "accents" and "word signs". The capitalist state must aim to regulate, through governance and law, dialogue within a public sphere. By focusing on the Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park, London in 1855, I show how these theories can be employed to explore how a radical social movement appropriated space by developing a working class public sphere.     

Alliances Across Ideologies: Networking with NGOs in a Tourism Dispute in Northern Bali

This paper explores how local actors form alliances and join networks with (inter-)national NGOs working on religious, political and environmental issues in a dispute over tourism development in northern Bali. All of these actors construct a particular concept of landscape which serves their respective goals to contest or defend the planned large-scale tourism projects. Three of these conceptual framings are identified as playing a major role in the conflict: (1) a spiritual Hindu-Balinese perspective mobilised by tourism protesters and NGOs; in alliance with (2) views on landscape based on sustainability and conservation powerfully represented by international NGOs; clashing with (3) a material and economic view of landscape by international investors, who consider land primarily as a commodity generating economic value. These three contrasting views and resulting networks provide an instrument of moral and political pressure for the contending parties in this conflict over natural resources and tourism development.